What Is The Best Email Server/Service for use with ERPNext now?

it looks like office 365 depreciated some sort of authentication system that erpnext requires so now my server is full of error messages.

What is everyone else using for email that works with erpnext?

I have used sendinblue and Oracle Email Delivery. Any service that uses standard username/password authentication should work.

hows gmail for business with erpnext?

This is a highly subjective question; the answer will vary greatly from person to person.

I see ERPNext email belonging to one of 4 different categories. Depending on your needs, you may need more than 1 provider.

1. Basic send-only email capability.

You want to email alerts or reports to ERPNext Users.

  • Suggestions:
    • Unless you have thousands of ERPNext Users, probably anything is fine. There are many hundreds of email providers that can offer you send-only email capability. Just pick your favorite and try it out.
    • Lots of people use Gmail, Microsoft 365, Yahoo, Zoho, etc.
    • I don’t like to feed the big tech monstropolies, so I advise my clients to use Proton Mail or something similar.

2. Bi-Directional email “Inbox” capability.

This is where ERPNext acts like an email client, capable of both sending and receiving emails. To make this work, you have to configure both SMTP (outbound) and IMAP/POP3 (inbound) protocols.

  • Suggestions:
    • Microsoft 365 recently required clients that receive email to use advanced authentication. For the moment (January 2023), this means ERPNext cannot use Microsoft 365 for bi-directional email.
    • Choose a provider that supports Basic Authentication for IMAP or POP3.

3. Marketing Emails

You want to send hundreds of thousands of emails to potential customers, marketing your company’s products.

  • Suggestions:
    • The challenge here is volume. Not every email provider will let you transmit in such huge quantities.
    • To achieve this, you may need a specialty email provider. There are a few dozen options. Some popular ones are SendInBlue, Omnisend, Mailchimp, Moosend.

4. Transactional Emails

Emailing invoices to your customers, or Purchase Orders to your suppliers.

  • Suggestions:
    • With these emails, it is very important these get delivered successfully. You don’t want these emails ending up in spam, or being blocked as untrustworthy.
    • To achieve this, you may want to choose an email provider that is known to be safe-listed. A few examples are SendGrid, Postmark, Mandrill, etc.
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so for Bi-Directional typical CRM work type emailing back and forth. if Microsoft 365 is out… im looking at your suggestion of Proton Mail I have not heard of them before. I dont need any of the apps office 365 gives at the time I just signed up for it because deliverability was suppose to be good but I dont use the storage space or anything else so it should be an easy migration to another service.

looks like 3.99 for Proton Mail Plus that lets you have your domain name emails. ie me@example.com and 10 email accounts under that plan. not bad.

I use mxroute which lets me have an unlimited number of accounts and domains and pay only the storage. No issues so far with undeliverable mail. This qualifies for the type 1 and 2 in Brian’s list, but I don’t know that I’d use it for marketing/ category 3.

In terms of value, if are already using an EC2 instance at the largest of big tech monstropolies you can get a crazy lot of emails for free with their simple mail service which qualifies for all four categories. If you aren’t using AWs, I’m with Brian: don’t start.

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working on setting up proton mail now and ditching office 365. apparently I did not read far enough into this… Proton Bridge is required to be installed on the erpnext server to make this work? ugh…

Sendinblue for all types. Works well. Using for past 5 years without any issue.

hows this work with proton mail bridge? I have not tried setting it up yet but this post doesnt look good Proton Bridge Email Domain

If you are sending normal Emails ( like alerts, quotes, and invoices) through ERPNext, you can use your own cloud instance to send emails directly. It will never get blocked. But if you want to send marketing emails etc in bulk qty use SendGrid or Oracle e-mail delivery system. We have used Oracle for a long time, and none of our servers got blocked.

it ended up installing without issue. it seems everything works nicely with proton mail and erpnext so far.